Spotlight: Aliza Nisenbaum

APRIL 13-MAY 7, 2022

The FLAG Art Foundation’s Spotlight exhibition series includes new or never-before-exhibited artworks accompanied by commissioned pieces of writing. In its second iteration, the Spotlight features Aliza Nisenbaum’s Susanna Paints, 2022, with a text by art historian, curator, and writer Jennifer Samet.

“Matrilineal: Aliza Nisenbaum's ‘Susanna Paints,’ 2021”
by Jennifer Samet

The palette depicted at the center of Aliza Nisenbaum’s painting Susanna Paints, 2022, is an energy center of the work. Its soft, aqueous pool of mixed pigments is framed by a color wheel of paint squares. I see the palette as a symbolic “heart chakra”—a spiritual energy center in the Sanskrit yogic tradition, which, when unblocked, opens up the possibility of selfless love.

In fact, the power of Susanna Paints is its sense of devotion to its subject—who is given more primacy than the painter. Here, the subject is artist Susanna Coffey, who was Nisenbaum’s teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The two painters have remained close friends. Nisenbaum commits willingly to the idea of portraiture as a collaboration. She suggests that within the space of the painting, the ego of the artist—as represented by her painterly means—can be quieted in order to amplify the voices of the sitters.

In 2012, Nisenbaum began painting portraits of undocumented migrants and their families, who she met through her work with the activist artist Tania Bruguera’s organization Immigrant Movement International. Since that time, Nisenbaum has made it her project to depict those who aren’t traditionally heroized in portraiture: museum guards, London’s public transit staff, frontline pandemic workers.

Nisenbaum’s work has a sociopolitical bent: she shows how all of these lives are interconnected, indispensable, and integral to the functioning of our society. She is depicting the fabric of our lives: relatives and co-workers in figure groups, in their homes or workplaces. The patterns of textiles and wall hangings adorning these interiors are a metaphor for the layered richness of our personalities and experience—the literal fabric of our lives.

In Susanna Paints, the central palette seems to emanate into the flowers, leaves, and fruit decorating the Mexican oilcloth spread on the floor in front of her. Throughout the painting, the organic and soft areas contrast with angles and harder surfaces. The spiral of Coffey’s bun and the flower pattern of the bandana wrapped around her hair are counterbalanced by the paintbrushes that stick out of the bun in different directions. It is whimsical, but it is also something of a crown—and, indeed, evocative of the yogic symbol for the crown chakra. The walls of the room tilt inward, as if to protect this sacred space and enclose its energy.

The materiality and substance of Susanna Coffey’s presence and body command this space. As Coffey herself has pointed out, she has some of the seated weightiness of Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s 1905–6 portrait. I think of the masklike features that Picasso ultimately gave Stein. Here, Coffey is heavy lidded, squinting, her face in a concentrated gaze that suggests a slow process of perception and attention to color relations. Coffey’s own painting practice considers mask traditions, and societal “masking,” so these references feel intentional.

Nisenbaum’s portrait of Coffey was occasioned, in fact, by Coffey first painting Nisenbaum. Coffey made a series of small paintings of women artists in their studios at night. There is a doubling (or tripling?) of the gaze here: Nisenbaum took a photograph of Coffey as she was painting her for the series, and then made this portrait from the photograph.

Nisenbaum credits Coffey as her most transformative and revelatory teacher. She had arrived at the School of the Art Institute from her native Mexico City at the age of 21. There, Coffey taught her the mode of painting, observing, and mixing color that she adopted. It is called “passage painting” or “relational observation,” where, instead of establishing a figure/ground hierarchy, each area of color and tone is represented as its own passage of paint. To see in passage means that you are seeing holistically, and observing the relational qualities of different colors. Flesh is not a de facto surface; rather, it is made up of color facets. Nisenbaum recalls an experience in which Coffey helped her to mix numerous tones of green for one painting, and later, when she went outdoors, she could see the world in a new way.

The broader ramifications of this way of observing and painting are that everything is equalized. The surface of a leaf can be seen and treated with as much significance as a face. For Nisenbaum, whose goals, as both a person and an artist, are to shed light on relational issues, this pedagogical methodology must have had profound resonance.

Nisenbaum considers this portrait to represent a matrilineage in that it portrays a woman artist who taught her a way of working in a way that she could share with her own students. In recent years, the two have taught side by side at Columbia University. Both artists draw attention to the work of women. In her painting, Nisenbaum equally attends to the tools of this work: the brushes, the folds and stains of the painting jacket Coffey wears, the rag at her waist, the surface of the canvas she is painting, the milk crate holding cans and cups of her medium. Coffey’s hand, holding and dipping her brush, is treated with a sensitivity that speaks to Nisenbaum’s regard for and dedication to her former teacher. This is a painting buzzing with the concentrated work of both women.

Nisenbaum’s stated goal is not as simple as an empathic relationship between painter and subject. She recognizes that it is impossible to fully understand or project oneself into another person’s experience. Instead, she dedicates herself to slow, observational experience—the ethics of paying attention.

About:

Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977, Mexico City, Mexico) is an artist living and working in New York, NY. Nisenbaum studied psychology at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico, from 1997-99, and earned a BFA in 2001 and an MFA in 2005 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. Recent solo exhibitions include AQUÍ SE PUEDE (HERE YOU CAN), Atrium Project, Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2021); Aliza Nisenbaum, Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2020); Flora, Drawings by Aliza Nisenbaum, Anton Kern Gallery, NY (2020); among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Reflections on Perception, Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH (2022); Picturing Motherhood Now, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (2021); 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2020); Nine Lives, Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2020); among others. Nisenbaum has been the subject of articles, podcasts, and reviews in publications including Art in America, Artforum, artnet news, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Modern Art Notes Podcast, The New York Times, The New Yorker, T Magazine, among others.

Jennifer Samet is a New York City-based art historian, curator, and writer who specializes in contemporary and post-war painting. She is a faculty member of the New York Studio School and the author of “Beer With a Painter,” an interview-based column in the online arts magazine Hyperallergic.

#AlizaNisenbaum